


His Eyes Were Closed

by 13letters



Series: fare thee well, oh, honey [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A Study of Jaime Lannister in His Own Finality, Drowning, F/M, Introspection, Memories, Spoilers for 07:04, Spoilers for 07:05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-12 07:30:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11732406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13letters/pseuds/13letters
Summary: He tries to fight this unforgiving adversary like hell like high water, like it could extinguish the fire above like breath would snuff out a candle, but he's kicking and clawing and grappling and begging and cursing andtryingto break the surface above until he isn't.





	1. Chapter 1

It's a tale as all the tragedies go with a flicker of romance and a penchant of heroism. The parallels drawn between a crowd of awed admirers and a raging sea of support and glory: gold glittering like high praise and salvation, cheers so akin to the whisper of a weapon sheathed, death like the quiet, small voice whispering that it might be alright from this battlefield away to think of this as _the end_.

Jaime Lannister tries to breathe.

He tries to fight this unforgiving adversary like hell like high water, like it could extinguish the fire above like breath would snuff out a candle, but he's kicking and clawing and grappling and begging and cursing and _trying_ to break the surface above until he isn't.

He's a sinking stone of a man burdened by his own armor, almost killed by his own figurative sword since irony has made him a legend and his litany of smiles have made him his own villain. It's the most poignant free fall in the face of all eternity -- his life on the brink of death yet waiting still, standing to face this as a knight would, "Ser Jaime," he hears.

 

It's from so far away.

Winter wasn't yet a blanket of snow to bury this graveyard of a continent, it was summer more like autumn, leaves that crackled like the flames of a fire gone out, the shadows of midnight dark across the Wench's worried face. "What are you doing?" she asked him.

And red with fever, sweaty and sickly and smoldering and _dying_ , he shakes with his chattering teeth. The rotted stump of his right hand promises to kill him with his temperature so high he'd burn deeper than any hell, but it's so cold, too, and with his blue lips. His paling skin. The wind surrounding them beckons his closed eyes to his watery grave impending. "Dying," he answers back.

It isn't the breath of fresh air he hoped it would be. In defiance, he tries to swim, but his arms feel almost as heavy as his eyelids.

 

"Wake up," his father hisses.

And Jaime's whole body jerks. He's sitting on the floor of his father's solar, is tracing letters of the alphabet while Tywin suffers through missives and scrolls, but he can't make the letters stick together into sentences, he's -- he's just a boy, and it's like his vision is darkening to nothing. It's like his brain doesn't have air enough to make sense of anything but panic and urgency, when a maid refills his father's goblet, oh, gods.

The slosh of water makes Jaime _scream_.

"Making a fuss won't shorten the length of your lessons!" Tywin erupts, cool command in his voice like Jaime's own giving the orders of defense, like the wind howling outside. It's the spear slicing through air in his hands, it's the scratch of the quill in his little boy hand; this is all wrong.

"Father," he gasps. And it's all of his breath, when he sees his father now, he's blurred like a reflection in ripples in waves, he -- he has painted stones for eyes. "Father, I'm going to die."

"Don't be so dramatic," Tywin Lannister scolds. "Do you want to be a simpleton forever?"

"You're not listening," Jaime begs him, suddenly so scared for once, _be brave_ , be brave. Death can be glory. Death can be honorable. "Father, I'm drowning. I'm not ready."

"I wasn't," remarks Tywin, strangely. He's looking straight at him with those painted green eyes, unblinking but so judgmental, _why_ , "I didn't deserve it, either."

Just, his lungs are treading water, and the guilt fast around his heart, oh, no. Jaime thinks he's losing the will to keep reaching for shore. He means to say so, but the water has his tongue mute to plead and cry, and he's only six years old here, three decades too early, thinking he will deserve it when it comes. _If_.

 

"Father."

Myrcella shines and shimmers in gold, and light touches all around her. She's in the hold of this ship with Jaime all over again, but the sounds of waves clawing at the wood, the creaking of planks and the groans of a ship threatening to give out, the water that is burning his throat and promising him _almost; you don't have to open your eyes._

"You don't," she insists. "I promise, it will be alright if you don't. Tommen and Grandmother and I, we miss you."

"I haven't left," Jaime tries, insisting because in memory -- flesh and regret. She was all the best of him, snark and genuinity and the honor he always lacked, "Myrcella."

"Or you can swim," she tells him like that's it, all he needs to choose to live or to die. It shouldn't be a difficult decision. The kiss of poison has made her lips purple, but his still chatter and he still shakes so vigorously that she frowns so prettily, laughs almost, as she hugs him just as she did then. "Or don't, Father. It's alright. You must be so tired."

"I'm trying to swim," he says, inhaling this bleeding, ash air like its her Dornish perfume, like it isn't water in his diaphragm making him a liar. "I'm so tired, Myrcella."

The ocean caresses him, presses him further down into the murky depths, or maybe it's just her trying to guide him to the darkness that breaks his vision, to the bright light shining high on: dragon fire. Sunlight.

It changes and changes, pierces pain in his abdomen when she suddenly begins coughing up blood the instant he begins to try spitting up water and smoke.

If it's her tears or just his watery bed, he doesn't know, but she made dying look like falling asleep and it's what this endless floating is beginning to feel like.

"Father," she sighs. "If you were trying to swim, you'd fight."

 

And then he gasps open, cracking, fleeting fresh air that burns his lungs and bruises his ribs. He's nine years old and is a lion bathing in the sun, is predator and prey all at once in the water beyond the cliff's edge; _oh_ , he'll think when that first wave comes roaring. That this used to be a game, that all of life was when he was important and handsome and golden and worth more than it costs to say _thank you, I'm sorry, flee, you idiot_ , oh, Warrior, Father, Mother, _Maiden_.

He is nine years old, and it isn't just Cersei's voice screaming down at him any longer. There is his father's scolding voice of panic hidden by anger.

"Come out of the water this instant!" Tywin shouts imperiously, but the clear, warm water murkens and thickens like smoke, and where there once was just sun and his laughter and waves that kissed him for diving in, there's this weight that won't relent.

"I'm going to drown," he says then, since with just a blink, the splash of a wave outside of Casterly Rock sounds like the manic kicks of his rescuer breaching this lake's surface. "Please," he calls, so watery sounding it's swallowed, _someone_.

Being slammed into the cliff-face is too reminiscent of his armor collapsing him to the bed of this lake.

 

He seizes. He kicks. He opens his eyes, squints through the cloudy water to the fading light of daybreak up above, but his bones feel made of iron, his tongue tastes of copper.

His body feels at once so heavy that it's almost a blessing as all he's wanted for so long is to _rest_ in peace and in recollection, to give his thoughts a chance to think clearly in stark decisions of what he wants or doesn't here at this end of the world.

Winter weighs him down like his oaths did, armor like layers of pretense the cynicism he would cling to with a grip so solid it was only fitting it became gold. He thinks to swim and to live, _Ser Jaime, you must live,_ she had begged of his closed eyes and his wasted existence, _oh_.

In suffocating delirium, he sees the water around him as sapphire blue, eyes reaching to him in the deep, as well, beckoning him like her only true vow was to save him _always_ , but where was his self-preservation and the conviction he had stolen from her with a kiss or with a curse, just give him back the whole of the breathing sky, and she'll ask for back her flesh, beating, breathing heart.

His world sharpens to a focal point of bright white.

 

There is Cersei holding all of Westeros in one of her hands and Jaime's own heart in the other, and asking her to choose is easier than having him decide if this is the last fight he wants to win or to lose; could he have done it? Actually killed Daenerys?

Can he do it? Let himself die?

"I might," he answers himself, and it's easy to speak through the water now. Though perhaps it's just his anger cutting through the ripples like her disassociation has always cut through him. "I might die, Cersei," he whispers to her, because they really are just foolish, blinded, cocksure teenagers in this bed, and even if he regrets it, he knows he once used to love her more than he thinks he now wants to survive.

On her pale, fair skin, his own hand looks sallow, his flesh sunken in, already like death by drowning is actually quicker than a rope and a broken neck.

"Cersei," he repeats since she hasn't so much as looked at him, " _Cersei_. Did you hear me? I'm dying. I loved you, Cersei, I _did_ ," he implores, once with every beat of his own heart and all his loyalty. He's staring at her for he doesn't know how long, as long as he's dead weight at the bottom of this lake, waiting, _waiting_ for this tumultuous edge of just _inhalation_ of doubt. He'd gladly drown and stay buried in the river. He might welcome it.

But it hurts. Of course it does. Cersei inevitably shudders away from him, frowns at his blue, frozen skin, and complains by way of mean-hearted justification: "Your _hand_ is cold."

 

But he is glorious and smirking and gallant. He is more the Smiling Knight instead of the Sword of the Morning.

He finds he means it when he says, "The things we do for love," like any conscious choice can be forgiven by the gods if there's the romantic ideology, the tragedy scripted by heavenly bodies, the red comet burning in the sky.

Red for the blood of men, red for dragons, red like the pulsing edge of passion that colored each of his veins. Red like the shame and the fear that will burn him within seconds, _wait_ , Brandon Stark whispers before the fall. A raven quorks overhead.

Jaime's fist is still tangled in his doublet, and he watches as the boy's eyes go white, as serenity smooths his face to all-knowing, to justice in the end after all.

"You're going to fall, too," Bran says, and Jaime can feel the fall submerged now like his ribs are splinters breaking his bones all convex. "You're going to drown, Ser Jaime," he says without any feeling at all, but then his eyes are brown again. Then he's being pushed to paralyzation.

 

"No," Tyrion begs so earnestly he's crying, "no, _no_ , Jaime, _no_!" he shouts from this battlefield away, "swim, you fucking cunt! You simpleminded, foolish, brave, good man, _Jaime_ ," he's begging.

There's just no one to hear him. The Dothraki don't speak Common.

"Please, Mother," Tyrion gasps. Be it the deity, Joanna, anyone who might listen, the Queen herself, _please_.

Jaime is his brother.

Please, gods, selfish, cruel, motherfucking, unforgiving cunts who won't let any slight go, who won't let any man live for the sake of life alone, "Please," he whispers, _he is half of me_ ; he might be all he has left in the world when this war is over. No star was ever supposed to shine as bright, he was never supposed to have been taken so unfairly, _why_ , "Swim, Bronn," he chokes. "Where is Jaime?"

 

"Ser Jaime," Brienne calls him, her voice carrying like one of the heavens sent already, everything is burning. "You must live."

 

"Father," Jaime says, and oh, his cracking voice, the pity that's lying in wait at the bottom of this lake and beckoning him with dark, waterlogged fingers; none of the letters make sense: _ambush_ , his father's stern gaze is the judgment of death waiting for the Kingslayer's verdict, life so close to death. "Father. I'm going to drown."

 

"Swim!" Tyrion shouts at him. The word is like a hand through the water, salvation so close.

 

"Father," Tommen cries, but he's older, wiser, kinder, _everything_ Jaime never was that neither of them will get to be, "I was drowning, too."

 

The effects of his life on Cersei's, her face twists and twists in scorn like malice, like the flesh gnarled at his right hand's wrist. "You can't leave me. You wouldn't dare. How could you?" Since it still has to be of her, doesn't it?

 

"This isn't how it it's supposed to end," his mother's gleaming face reasons like a shimmer in the water, a ray caught forever, "no, not like this for my brave, true knight," with death on her face and resolve etched onto his.

 

Light shards the water like a thousand fragments of a disparate soul _almost_ ready to swallow pride like more water, a life on the edge that's waiting to be told to live or to die; fate like gallantry in the time of war, the quiet that shakes this battlefield still of bitterness and hate -- the soldiers that fall in the end that rise in spirit and in sunlight within seconds -- the songs that will be sung of the men who burned and the glory that blazed.

It's a tale as all the tragedies go with a flicker of romance and a penchant of heroism. The parallels drawn between a crowd of awed admirers and a raging sea of support and glory: gold glittering like high praise and salvation, cheers so akin to the whisper of a weapon sheathed, death like the quiet, small voice whispering that it might be alright from this battlefield away to think of this as _the end_.

Jaime Lannister decides.

Life or the brink of death.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who's there to say that Jaime might have chosen wrong? Who's there to say no, _no, you must live_ so he will?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same drill, loves! 
> 
> This second chapter no one asked for that might be a bit unnecessary, yes, but this latest chapter gave me a whole hoUND of feelings I've otherwise no way to deal with, so here. xox!

Ser Jaime Lannister, blessed, beautiful, betraying, begging soul of a drowning man, a sinking stone amidst a river's current, what ought to be a ripple of _change_ as fire rains down, as the only souls to hear, they're lying under the safety of a waterlogged grave, they're corpses and the bloodthirsty cries, they're the pious belief of a Dragonqueen who dares mistake goodness and justice for conviction and malice, _oh_ , poor, broken, living _Jaime_ , dear. 

He could see light like heavens promised or hell impending. 

He could see his children, his only true, good children and his angry, resolute father. 

He could see the Mad King like the scale of good and right, the spare second he gave to consider becoming the good man a kind, true woman once claimed him to be. He spared an instant of his murderous, wretched life to think just perhaps, if he'd ever dare, if he were a much better man he would have helped Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen pull that barbed arrow from her child. He could have fell to his knees in apology, in grief so apathetic it's the plight of the dying man: wholesome, mournful, _drowning_ regret so powerful he almost considered never opening his eyes, too, never reaching for salvation and a swarthy grin and yet another life of debt. 

He breaks the surface, and his lungs may as well be fire already. He tries to gasp in precious, crimson air, and it aches, it does, burns and shrivels and tears, but clawing to life with only one hand is a fight in itself, and when he spits up the lake water. 

When he lays on that sandy gravel and feels already like he's lost something far more profound than the fleeting breath of life. 

Who's there to say that Jaime might have chosen wrong? Who's there to say no, _no, you must live_ so he will? 

So he does.


End file.
